One of the worst things an analyst can do is make a prediction that includes both a price and a date. Odds are you’ll end up with egg on your face.

But one thing we can do is look at history. Today’s gold bull market won’t be identical to others in the past—but history does provide clues about how high the price might go based on prior trends.

By my calculations, there have been five gold bull markets since it was legal to own again in 1975. Here are the percentage gains of each, plus how long they lasted.

You’ll see a lot of disparity among them, but even the weakest bull market saw gold rise 25% in less than two and a half years. The average gain was 253.6%.

What I find interesting is that all but one of these uptrends peaked in less than three years. That may sound short to you, but on the other hand if our current bull market acted similarly, we could see some very nice gains in just two short years.

You might make the 2001 to 2012 period all one bull market, but at least this gives us a picture of what has happened in the past.

So let’s have some fun and apply those past bull markets to today…

Our bear market low was $1,049.40 on December 17, 2015 (based on London PM Fix prices). So how high would the gold price go—and when would it peak—if we matched any of those bull markets from the past?

Here’s what you get…

Three of the five matches would see gold hit a new all-time high. They’d also be more than a double from current prices.

The average 253.6% gain would see gold reach a cool $3,710 per ounce.

Four of them would see us peak between December 2017 and April 2018. That’s not that far away. Only one from the past lasted longer. The average duration of the five bull markets was 987 days, about two years and eight months.

Of course, the current market could end in a mania and hit the $8,000 level or higher. I hesitate mentioning that, because I don’t want to us to expect it. But given the trajectory of our deflating economy, toppy stock market, unmanageable debt load, the spread of negative rates, growing terrorism, desperate politicians, and misguided central bankers, we can’t ignore the possibility that a true gold rush could be in the cards. An $8,000 gold price may not be a fun environment to live in, but we’d be darn glad we owned a meaningful amount of bullion.

This is all to show that we could see some real fireworks in the gold price over the next couple years.

It also suggests that you don’t want to wait too long to buy. As we showed last week, buying this summer—and before August—might just be your last chance to grab the best value of the year.